yes, believe it or not, i think the winning strategy for new windowses is to be a replica of their predecessor... all microsoft really want is just getting their customers to upgrade, and laptop makers to preinstall windows on their machines. the only reason a big corporation is going to upgrade their windows, is when its deprecate and no longer maintained, they bite their lips, and move on with an upgrade. but guess what? windows xp was and still is working for most of them... so the smart choice would have been to release windows vista to be an XP replica, with few enhancements. it doesnt matter you're selling the same OS under a new name, with just few enhancements that you could have released as a service pack for the older OS, when the time comes, people will upgrade.

keep in mind, businesses don't like huge change... nor do a large portion of customers... they have worked hard to get accustomed to all the features of XP, telling them to learn it all again is not a recipe for happy noob customers, or large companies with a complex IT infrastructure

because being in the UN is a very useful front to show your peace. when you run the whole organization, and convince everyone this is a global peace organization... you just keep winning... you're indirectly controlling the whole world, with a *peace* flag... you can go invade any country you want in the world, in the name of peace, and then have this puppet peace organization approve it for you..

the UN is the world's best joke, that goes on and on, and amazingly, no one ever gets bored watching it re-do its magic tricks again!

Well, as a computer technician, i loved the few years of Vista. I had so many customers buying new laptops, and asking me to downgrade them... Those were the good time, cash pouring in all the time.

Then came 7, it was good, no one wanting a downgrade, but certainly lots of people needing help to upgrade. Maintenance-wise, 7 didn’t prove to be a challenge, and fixing its problems is usually simpler, especially with the addition of repairing tools to the boot partition.

I guess now with windows 8, we'll go back to the downgrade frenzy phase... I look very forward to it.. and even more hopefully, Microsoft will again, as with Vista, learn the errs of their ways, and produce a good windows 9.

whatever the result... I’m happy with my Linux and KDE here... windows is nothing but a huge job opportunity to me :)

same thing in Lebanon... but the government needs to revise a careful standard, and safety laws for this. in lebanon, it was all done chaotically, in private specialist shops, in ways that adhere to no safety standards at all, resulting in a lot of nasty accidents. same thing for converting cards from normal fuel to red or green gasoline. if not done appropriately, you could total the engine.

a lot of things these days.. don't you think?

yes, exactly! i prefer that my images are sharper, i use a 6 MP camera, a point-and-shoot Sony, and the images are all blurry, and i reduce them to 1280x1024 pixels anyway... i prefer it takes *sharp* 1280x1024 pictures rather than blurry, or dark 987432432x9890432 pictures.

actually no, the travel time is much shorter than that of processing. in fiber-optic networks, latency appears on the nodes.

... to they killed the hell out of themselves?

Extremely patient man! I wish hm the best in his future endeavors.

this open source thingie is used for writing malware!! someone must stop them, all opensource must be deemed illegal, and richard stallman should be prosecuted for aiding criminals. if you don't believe me, go ask microsoft, they'll agree with everything i just said.